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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

most websites take 3-7 seconds to load because of all the ads and bloat, and things shift around on you for another 20 seconds after that, so when you go to tap a link you accidentally tap an ad that finally loaded under your finger

The problem with remarks like this is that if this was really your experience of using the web you'd have installed an ad blocker years ago, and you wouldn't make that argument now. Consequently either it's easily dismiasable as hyperbole or you're a masochist who enjoys terrible websites.

There are bad websites. It isn't "most websites" though. Just like some games drop frames horribly, but not "most games".

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I'm using an ad blocker, and with a cold cache, clicking a Twitter link shows a blue bird for a second, then two blue spinners (center and top) and then after 3 or 4 more seconds I can finally see a message that's a maximum of 280 characters long. News sites don't load much faster. Pages like HN are the exception, and mostly come from the tech corner. I've been on some brand's online store a few days ago and it felt like they want to drive customers away.

But fair enough, it might not actually be most websites, but enough to not be a rare experience either.

I just checked twitter's network log on a single tweet by John Carmack.

- 131 network calls

- 280 kilobytes of data received

- 4500ms total network time

Thankfully, the vast majority of other websites aren't nearly this bad, but we're trending towards twitter as an industry, not away from it.

I try to write API calls that provide broadband utility and return lightning fast by always making sure my critical path gets a fair shake for optimization, but I know there exist calls out there in react land that take my 220ms response and spend an extra 7 seconds transforming it to populate a (paginated) table on the UI.

Amount of data transmitted seems fine...but 131 network calls? No wonder it always feels so slow to use Twitter.

Keyword and. Ads and bloat. Adblocking doesn't get rid of all bloat.

And GP's point still stands. 17ms vs the typical 2s minimum a site takes to load is massive given the differences in what is demanded. Games actively got faster despite being more intense, websites active got slower despite relatively similar output.

Webdev's performance is shocklingly bad relative to most other subfields.

Comparing the loading time of a website to the frame render time of a console game hardly seems fair.

Plenty of websites scroll at 60fps or 120fps just fine (and those that don’t definitely deserve to be criticised).

How many console games can load from scratch in only a few seconds?

Your comparing gigabytes of data to a few MB. Now that hardly seems fair.

This is a reasonable point, _but_ how much data do games need to load versus a website. Using Twitter as an example, when I open it I can see 4 tweets. Assuming each tweet is 1MB (for easy math), I have a 500Mb WiFi connection, I should be be able to do 100 tweets in under a second. Meanwhile most/many games are pulling in gigabytes of data in textures and audio data. Spiderman on PS5 is under 15 seconds from the home screen to being in game, playing which is about how long it takes for the Facebook mobile website to load.

Comparing latency and throughput of local and remote assets says nothing.

GP's point ignores the load times of a game (the time it takes to have a usable game-no progress bar), and instead compares FRAME time (17 ms to render a single frame) with the LOAD TIME of a website.

You too ignore this.

You might know this already but in case you didn't: ad-blockers are the reason browsers are considered greedy pigs when it comes to resources.

It's no longer a universal truth that a adblocker will save you memory or CPU, ad-blockers contribute greatly to the per-tab memory cost. They also slow down page rendering greatly.

But, hey, the web is an unusable mess without them so we all use one and it's considered the cost of doing business.

noscript can block most ads without much memory overhead

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